Pripyat evacuee Lydia Malesheva at a memorial in Slavutych.
Photograph: Lynn Hilton for the Guardian

In a biting winter wind, Alexander Petrovich Zabirchenko walks slowly along a memorial to firefighters and workers who died in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, touching each of the portraits engraved in granite. He does not shiver or complain of the cold. He is a big man and draws himself up to his full height before each sombre stone.

“Here is Valeri, and here Vladimir and Alexandr and Anatoli … I knew these men,” he says. “I worked with them. They were colleagues and friends.”

As one of the many Chernobyl workers who returned to the devastated plant to fight the fires, Zabirchenko is an official “Hero of the Soviet Union”. He bats away the honour with a wave of his hand.

“These men were the heroes; every one of them. They died preventing an even bigger disaster. They saved not just Ukraine, Russia or the Soviet Union as it was, but the whole of Europe.”

Next month, thousands of men, women and children in the northern Ukrainian city of Slavutych, will gather at the memorial here to light candles to the 30 initial victims of the world’s worst nuclear accident. Three decades on, they will remember not just the dead, but the memories and dreams they left behind in Pripyat, the ghost city that was once their home.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant soon after the accident in 1986. Photograph: AP

The story of Pripyat and Slavutych is a tale of twin cities: Pripyat, a former model Soviet metropolis built to house Chernobyl workers but abandoned to radioactive contamination and the ravages of nature; Slavutych, an urban phoenix that rose from the ashes of the disaster to replace it.

If Pripyat represents destruction, defeat, a lost city, a dead city – then Slavutych is the resurrection

Volodimir Udovichenko

It took 36 hours after an ill-judged test on Reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant went catastrophically wrong, for the Soviet authorities to order the evacuation of Pripyat, just two miles from the plant.

In under four hours, more than 49,000 people left their homes, most shuttled away from the plant – but not the cloud of radioactive dust carried by wind over swaths of western Europe – by a fleet of 1,200 buses.

They were told they would be gone for two or three days and advised to take the minimum: identity papers, documents, food and clothing. None ever returned to live in Pripyat, declared too radioactively dangerous for human habitation for at least 24,000 years.

Six months after the disaster, the Soviet authorities declared a new city would be built around 30 miles to the north-east of the power station, to replace the old one. Many of the families evacuated from Pripyat moved to this city, Slavutych – the old Slavic name of the nearby Dnieper River.

Alexander Zabirchenko was awarded the highest distinction in the Soviet Union for returning to Chernobyl to fight the fires. Photograph: Lynn Hilton

The area on which it was built was first covered in two metres of fresh, uncontaminated soil. Architects and construction workers from eight former Soviet republics – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lituania, Russia and Ukraine – were each tasked with creating one of the city’s eight districts. As a result, each district has its own distinctive cultural and ethnic features: so, flats and houses in the Georgian district have more decoration than those in the more austere Russian district next door.

Photographs in the city’s museum capture the excitement of the first residents: many followed the Ukrainian tradition of letting a cat cross the threshold of their new homes for good luck. At the time, the new city mayor, Volodimir Udovichenko, told them: “If Pripyat represents destruction, defeat, a lost city, a dead city – then Slavutych is the resurrection”.

Today, the number of former Pripyat residents in Slavutych has dwindled to fewer than one in three, but thousands are still to this day employed at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, despite its closure under European Union pressure in 2000.

Every morning the train from Slavutych transports workers such as 62-year-old Pasha Kondratiev, 50 minutes along the line to its only destination: the Chernobyl plant. Every evening, around 4.30pm it disgorges them back in Slavutych. All undergo daily radiation checks, including the train.

A rusting nuclear sign on a building in Pripyat, which was evacuated within days of the Chernobyl disaster. Photograph: Lynn Hilton

Kondratiev, who started work at the plant 33 years ago, works at Chernobyl checking radiation measuring equipment. On the day of the accident he and his wife Natasha and daughters Tatiana, 12, and Marina, 10, walked to the bridge over the river subsidiary feeding the nuclear plant’s cooling pond, to get a better view of what was going on. The site was later named “the bridge of death”, because of the levels of radiation in the area.

“I could see the ruins of the reactor. It was completely destroyed and there was a cloud of smoke coming from it. Nobody gave us any information, but we knew it was serious. We knew it was something terrifying,” Kondratiev says.

Nobody gave us any information, but we knew it was serious. We knew it was something terrifying

Pasha Kondratiev

The following day when the evacuation was announced, Natasha grabbed the girls and crossed the city to catch a train to relatives living in Smolensk in neighbouring Russia.

At their neat bungalow home in Slavutych, Kondratiev adds: “When I saw the power plant, I understood at once there was no chance we were going back …”

His wife shakes her head: “I definitely thought we were coming back at first. Then when we were on the train, some of the women whose husbands were firefighters were talking about how they’d been burned and were crying, and I became so worried about Pasha. My heart was beating so fast. In those days we didn’t have mobile phones and I had no idea what would happen to him.”

Workers from the Chernobyl plant return by train to Slavutych. Photograph: Lynn Hilton

Two years after the disaster, their previously healthy elder daughter Tatiana, became asthmatic. When she collapsed in the street in Slavutych, aged 19, the ambulance failed to arrive in time to save her.

“Who knows if Chernobyl caused her asthma. All we know is that before the accident she was healthy. She was exposed to radiation when she was 12, which is a critical age for a child’s development. It was probably linked to Chernobyl, but nobody can say for sure,” Natasha says.

She mourns for her daughter, and for their former home. “From the first day we came to Pripyat, I never wanted to leave. It was paradise. Everywhere there were roses and fruit trees, we could fish in the river and pick mushrooms in the forest. It seemed the place had been created especially for us.

“We went back to Pripyat a few years ago – it was very sad for us. We went to our apartment and saw the rooms and some of the things we left behind in 1986.”

Their second daughter, Marina Uldasheva, 39, says she remembers that just before the catastrophe, her mother had bought her a red raincoat. After she and her sister were evacuated, it was deemed radioactive and destroyed.

“I loved that coat; it was so fashionable. But all our clothes were taken away and my long hair was cut like a boy’s. They said it was radioactive too. We were given a blue worker’s boiler suit to wear, and slippers.

“I have no strong link with Pripyat – I was too young to remember it much. Unlike my parents, I have nothing with which to compare Slavutych, so it is my home and I will stay here.”

In the Russian district of Slavutych, Nikolai Syomin, 59, pins his medals declaring him a “Hero of the Soviet Union” to his jacket for a photograph. Syomin, a graduate of Leningrad Technical School employed as a repairman at Chernobyl, was celebrating his 30th birthday in his Pripyat flat on the evening of 25 April 1986.

“It was a hot evening and we left all the windows open. We saw some kind of smoke in the sky but we didn’t think much of it. Our apartment was in the centre of Pripyat. We later discovered the wind brought radioactive dust and made it one of the most contaminated areas.”

The following day, he phoned the nuclear plant. “I got through but was told they weren’t authorised to say anything and the person put the phone down. The next day they announced that Pripyat was being evacuated.”

As a designated “essential worker”, Syomin was told he must stay and help the clean-up operation. His wife Natalya, 60 – a cheerful, dignified woman, who worked as a nurse in Pripyat’s sports complex – says she grabbed one small bag and her three-year-old son Anton, and left.

The area on which Slavutych was built was first covered in two metres of fresh, uncontaminated soil. Photograph: Lynn Hilton

“In the hours after the accident, everyone received a dose of radiation. Where we lived was among the worst areas contaminated. The forest around was bulldozed and buried,” she says. “When we left, we didn’t realise that it would be for good. It was only months later that we realised nothing would ever be the same again.”

Slavutych has the same “spirit” as the city they left, Natalya says, but it will always be “our second home”.

“Pripyat holds so many memories for us. Our son was born there and everyone misses it. All we have are memories. It was mentally tough to go back, very painful, so we stopped going.

“The last time [we were there], we saw that everything is overgrown, so we have to work hard to hold on to our memories. At the time we were young, we were alive and nothing was a problem. We didn’t worry about living near the power plant. We were told it was safe.

“Every 26 April we meet with friends and neighbours from Pripyat to remember. But we cannot go back, so we have to look forward.”

Next door to the Syomins, Sergei Matolievich Shedrakov, 59, and his wife Alexandra Ivanovna, 60, recall being evacuated from Pripyat with their two children – daughter Katya, then aged five, and son Pavel, aged 16 months.

“There was no panic, but looking back it was terrifying,” says Alexandra, who used to work in one of Pripyat’s post offices. “People lived with the power plant, they worked there, they relied on it. We didn’t even think of radiation.

I miss Pripyat very much. Sometimes it’s too painful to think about it

Lydia Petrovna Malesheva

“Pripyat was a lovely city, life was good there – but it’s good here in Slavutych too. As the Russian saying goes, there are no good things without bad things.”

Lydia Petrovna Malesheva, 77, recalls the excitement generated by the news in the autumn of 1986 that Slavutych was to be built. “We were told a new city would be built just for us, the people who had lost Pripyat. We were so excited, we stayed up all night talking about it,” she says. “A city just for us. We could hardly believe it.”

Malesheva gives a guided tour of her small garden pointing out the “summer space” for barbecues, apple, apricot and pear trees.

“The first of us moved to Slavutych in August 1988. Those who had worked at the Chernobyl plant after the accident, like my late husband, were given a choice of apartments or little houses. We chose a house. Slavutych is lovely and the best solution in the circumstances – but it’s not Pripyat. I miss Pripyat very much. Sometimes it’s too painful to think about it.”

She adds: “We went back for the 20th anniversary and there were so many people, it was as if the city had come alive again, but of course it hadn’t.”

Once a year, around Easter, some former residents of the now contaminated “dead zone” around Chernobyl still return for a few hours – just long enough to visit relatives’ graves. Pripyat, built in 1970, was hailed as a triumph of Soviet urban planning: the austere concrete style favoured by USSR architects tempered by colourful murals and Communist slogans exhorting residents to study, work or remember the revolution. Boats and hydrofoils cruised the river whose sandy bank, nicknamed “The Beach”, was popular with sunbathers.

Pripyat’s shops were better stocked than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Its hospital and clinics were fully equipped, the Palace of Culture housed a theatre, and there were sports halls and an Olympic-sized swimming pool too. At the time of the accident, residents were excited about the impending May Day inauguration of an amusement park with a Ferris wheel, swingboats and brightly coloured dodgems.

Today, Pripyat is a ghost city. The Ferris wheel that never turned has become an enduring symbol of the disaster. Radiation levels hover around 62.3 microroentgens an hour (0.62 microsieverts): just over twice the normal background radiation in London, and less than going through an airport security scanner three times – which makes Pripyat safe enough for a brief visit, but not long-term habitation.

But Alexander Petrovich Zabirchenko, 68, who worked as head of Chernobyl’s electrical department, prefers not to return to his former home town, where he loved to fish in the river and the plant’s cooling reservoir. He has difficulty walking because of circulation problems he blames on radiation exposure, and will instead pay his tributes to the dead in Slavutych.

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“The cemetery here was built with enough room for 50 years,” Zabirchenko says, “but it’s already full. So many friend